Modern organizations typically employ a plurality of different devices for use by their employees. More recently, as networking and infrastructure virtualization become more popular, productive, and cost-effective, the organization devices may also include virtual resources (e.g., virtual servers, virtual databases, machines running virtual operating systems, etc.). These different devices, virtual and real, interact with one another to conduct the business of the organization. Such devices need to confirm that another device is who it claims to be, such that the device can be identified and/or trusted.
When a new device is provisioned to an organization's networking infrastructure, it is generally authenticated by an information technology (IT) specialist of the organization who oversees the provisioning of the new resource. After authentication, other authenticated devices of the organization may then trust the new device when interacting with it, such as by exchanging/authenticating digital certificates, verifying cryptographic keys, etc. This process of authenticating new organization devices, however, can be time consuming or even impossible in cases where virtual resources are provisioned dynamically and the IT specialist does not have access to the server running the virtual resource. As networks grow in size, and complexity, the problems associated with authenticating devices within the organization become more and more pronounced.